Photography and camera users can benefit from a zoom capability of the camera and camcorder devices to achieve desired scene framing. Standalone cameras typically include optical zoom capabilities to achieve the effect of scene framing. Smartphone cameras are limited in thickness and cannot accommodate optical zoom systems, but instead and must rely on digital zoom technology to achieve the effect of scene framing.
Digital zoom technology on current smartphones does not provide good quality for high zoom factors, such as 4× zoom. There are many annoying quality problems including artifacts, noise, loss of detail, and unnaturalness. These quality problems result from the fact that high quality digital zoom requires sophisticated image processing technology that is computationally expensive, and the fact that typical digital zoom (or upscale) algorithms do not handle high zoom ratios very well.